Scan Settings

Scan Settings controls how Vesper Audit behaves during a crawl and how your name appears in exported reports. These settings are found in Settings > Scan settings and Settings > Report options.

Page load timeout

Page load timeout sets how long Vesper Audit waits for each page to finish loading before moving on. The default is 30 seconds.

Increase the timeout for sites that load slowly - JavaScript-heavy pages, sites with large images, or pages that fetch data before rendering. Decrease it to speed up crawls on fast-loading sites where slow pages are unlikely.

The timeout applies per page. If a page does not finish loading within the timeout, Vesper Audit logs a warning and continues to the next page rather than stalling the crawl.

Page load timeout is available on all plans including free.

Page budget

Page budget sets the crawl size at which Vesper Audit pauses to ask whether you want to continue. The default is 1,000 pages. The other options are 50, 100, 500, 5,000, and Unlimited.

When the crawl reaches the budget it pauses and opens a prompt showing how many pages have been scanned and how many URLs are still queued. If it has noticed repetitive URL patterns - a paginated archive, a calendar feed, a faceted filter - it lists them with a pre-checked box each, and Apply and continue excludes those patterns and prunes the queue before resuming. When there is no pattern common enough to be worth excluding, the prompt says so and does not offer to apply anything. Continue resumes with the queue untouched, and Stop and build report ends the crawl and writes the full report for the pages already scanned - that report opens by stating it is partial and how many URLs were never reached.

It is a checkpoint, not a cap. You can choose Continue at every pause and let the crawl run as long as you like, and Unlimited turns the checkpoint off entirely. The point is that a large site cannot quietly become a 10,000-page run before anyone notices the events calendar is generating 9,000 of them.

Page budget is available on all plans including free, and is saved as part of Scan Profiles so different clients can carry different defaults.

Viewport width

Supporter feature
Viewport width requires a Supporter license or active trial.

Viewport width sets the browser window width Vesper Audit uses when loading each page during a scan. The default is 1280px.

Common values:

Changing the viewport width affects which CSS is applied and which elements are visible during the scan. Some accessibility violations only appear at certain breakpoints - a navigation menu that becomes a hamburger button on mobile may have different landmark or keyboard focus issues than its desktop equivalent.

Viewport width is saved as part of Scan Profiles, so you can maintain separate mobile and desktop configurations for the same site.

Palette contrast

Palette contrast tests the link colors Vesper finds on a site against background colors you name, whether or not the site currently puts them together. It is found in Settings > Palette contrast and is off until you add at least one color.

Why it exists

Contrast is normally measured between text and the background it is actually sitting on. That is the correct measurement, and it means a link color used on a white page is only ever checked against white. If the same color also appears on a pale grey panel somewhere, the pairing is only reported where some page happens to render it - so a site with no grey panels yet, or a calendar with no events this month, can return a clean result while the color sits in the theme waiting for a new template to expose it.

Naming the backgrounds your platform uses lets Vesper answer the other question: would this palette hold up on the surfaces this deployment cares about, whether or not the site combines them today.

What to enter

Add the backgrounds your templates actually put behind text - the page white, a panel or card grey, a tinted table row. Vesper accepts #EFEFEF, efefef, #eee and rgb(239,239,239), and shows a swatch beside each so you can see what you typed. A value it cannot read is reported in the scan log and in every report rather than being ignored, because a background silently dropped for a typo would produce a clean result for the wrong reason.

Backgrounds must be opaque. A translucent color has no fixed value to measure against and is rejected.

This does not replace the contrast check

The standard contrast check always runs.
Adding or removing colors here never turns it off. That check measures text as it is actually rendered against its real background and is the WCAG 1.4.3 requirement. Palette contrast is a second, separate question and only ever adds to your report.

How findings are reported

Pairs falling below 4.5:1 are reported for review. They are not counted as violations and do not affect your severity totals, because a color and a background the site never combines is not a failure on any page today. Reports from before and after this feature stay comparable.

Vesper only reports a pairing when the site already uses that color on a background similar to the one you named. White link text on a dark brand bar is correct, and measuring it against a white background gives a true but useless 1:1 - so that pairing is set aside instead. Set-aside pairs are still listed with the reason and the numbers behind it, because a result that quietly vanished would look exactly like one that passed.

The section appears in every output format: the PDF, Notion, Markdown, a --palette-contrast.csv file, and the in-app report viewer.

Auditor name

Supporter feature
Auditor name requires a Supporter license or active trial.

Auditor name lets you add your name or agency name to every exported report. When set, it appears in:

Leave the field blank to omit your name from all outputs. The field is in Settings > Report options > Auditor name.

Vesper Audit attribution

The Show Vesper Audit attribution toggle in Report options controls whether the "Tool: Vesper Audit" credit appears in exported reports. It is on by default. When toggled off, the Vesper Audit attribution line is removed from all output formats - the PDF scope strip, Notion output, and Markdown header.

This is typically used alongside auditor name when delivering reports to clients under your own brand. Setting your name and turning off the Vesper attribution produces a report that carries your identity rather than the tool's.

Show Vesper Audit attribution requires a Supporter license or active trial.